Unless Carlos Sainz’s victory at the Australian Grand Prix is the catalyst for a seismic shift in Formula 1’s competitive order, Ferrari will likely match its longest streak without a title at the end of 2024. Sixteen lean years passed between the Prancing Horse’s constructors’ championship trophies in 1983 and 1999, and this remains its biggest drought. But the teams’ title win in 2008 moves ever further away with the passage of time, the fading fingerprints of that year’s success only recently refreshed by Felipe Massa’s legal action against the FIA.
In seasons past, Ferrari’s failure to add to its tally of championships was often traced to the team itself. After the Jean Todt era, the group that had been instrumental in securing successive titles slowly began to disband. Ross Brawn left at the end of 2006, as did engine lead Paolo Martinelli. Chief designer Rory Byrne, the only man who could give Adrian Newey a run for his money in the early 2000s, wound down his involvement with the team on a consultancy basis until 2009. After 2008, the team looked markedly different to that which had conquered all before it only a few years before.
Over the next decade and a half, Ferrari became typecast as a team that couldn’t string a race strategy together and sometimes had the propensity to build poor cars. The F60 of 2009 was an example of the latter point, where the team had sunk so much time and resource into its fierce battle with McLaren over 2008 that it had underestimated the scale of
